Lucy was a tall, chatty, brave, good-looking girl. Being her older brother, I felt like I had her number pretty early on. She was younger, smaller and as a result, obviously stupider than me. Being a boy also made me completely superior to this small, noisy creature, and I realised with a timeliness that you could call my hallmark that she would need some controlling. As her older brother, it fell to me to school her in the ways of the world, even though I was myself only 18 months old when she careered into the world in 1982.
I don’t remember her arriving, of course. I was a bloody baby. Apparently, I ran around the maternity ward and kept the nurses, not to mention my long-suffering Dad, more than occupied while she was neatly Caesarian’d out of my Mum and into Poole General Hospital and peak-Thatcherism in June 1982. I have no recollection of this, as I was only 18 months old at the time. Having been the appreciative recipient of my own caesarian delivery at 1824 on February 1979, I would probably have thought it was standard procedure. Probably just gave her it some serious side-eye and moved on, busy in my own baby affairs. Frankly, though, side-eye would never have been in short supply, either, as I was born with the mother and father of all squints, too. Oh boy. My father, letters passed to me much later in life attest, was keen to get this physical abberation to his only son’s beautiful face mended pronto, and therefore I was shipped back into Poole General, where I’d hatched just nine months previously, to have it corrected in 1983. By then I can only assume we had our own parking space. Of course, this was the Eighties, so the eye-fiddling didn’t really work as expected. I went and grew quite a bit, and my eyes, it later emerged, had quite a bit more wrong with them than initially assumed.
Firstly, they didn’t really cooperate. They tersely got on, yes, but rather like a marraige becalmed by infidelities on both sides but glued together by long silences and children, they rarely worked well together, and when they did, the data that came back from each of them was often contradictory.
As a result, I fell over a lot. I banged into things. I lost stuff. I got lost ridiculously easily. I was clumsy first, then once I’d fallen down the same set of steps two or three times, as well as kerbs, loose paving slabs, blades of grass that were woefully misaligned and so on, the powers that be - my parents, Barry and Sue Jones, thought it prudent to get their Dear Son back to an eye doctor on the double.
On doing so, I was subjected to what can only be termed an armada of rafts of tests, and they diagnosed acute astigmatism, long-sightedness and mild aphasia, which means that left and right hemispheres of my considerable brain didn’t talk to eachother in a way the other could easily understand. In layman’s terms, I was a Clumsy Little Twat.
I, of couse, thought all of this was normal. After all, my eyes were my eyes, and what I saw was the only world I knew. Sometimes I fell over stuff I hadn’t seen previously. Sometimes I got lost. These things are sent to try us, really. I noticed, by about the age of four, that I was quite crap at catching a ball, and wasn’t the fastest runner, but I put that down to being small, and, well, four. It didn’t worry me. I was really ace at some stuff - reading, vocabulary, impressions, creative writing and imaginative stuff were all easy for me. Words would just form in my mind as soon as I heard them, and spelling was a matter of ‘reading’ what my mind’s eye told me the letters in a word were. I never thought about it. I still don’t, and I’ve been a writer for 20 years. It is just in the wiring, that.
Similarly, music has always had a transcendental quality to me. I don’t have synaesthesia - a condition which makes ‘sufferers’ able to perceive sound as colours, shapes or patterns, but I am acutely aware of harmonies, and discord is very noticeable and can be quite unpleasant.
I have always ‘understood’ music, and rhythm, in a sense. I’ve dabbled with guitars and keyboards since I was a kid, but reached the limits of my ability to play - not to mention my patience for scales - when I was about 20.
What I really love about music is improvisation - the ability it gives you to stand in a room and make magic out of thin air and shared ideas. I have been told I have good pitch and good timing, and of all the instruments I’ve ever had a go at, bass is my favourite.
Nobody likes the bass unless they are interested in the slivers of space between everything else, and being the glue that holds a song together. As a bassist, you’re a Sapper, in the engine room of the band, but you can turn, catch the drummer’s eye, and floor the accelerator whenever you want, in a way that no guitarist can. Being bass means you’ve bought a house between rhythm and harmony. Your job is to create a sense of speed, tension, mood and swing, as needed. Bassists don’t have to learn chords, either. They can smoke while they’re playing. They often die spectacularly. Their instruments are cheaper than guitars. Their amps are much louder. Bassists are often quiet and cool onstage, mostly because they are drunk or high, and not really thinking of anything much. Bass is not about thinking. It is about feeling. I have done some serious meditation while playing bass. I tried to do it on guitar, and everything just stops. Bassists are moody, but then their chosen instrument is pretty easy, while also being utterly vital. Every band needs one. Just listen to a band without a bass and you’ll quickly realise that what they need is something glueing the vocals to the guitar, and stirring the drums. It’s a really fucking cool job.
On a bass, I can change the whole feel of what the guitarist is doing without so much as looking up. That alchemical thing is so fleeting I can’t really describe it. When you’re in a room with four of your oldest friends, just jamming something, and it just gets really good out of nowhere, it feels like flying. I have done every drug it is sensible for a young man with time on his hands to fiddle with, and none of them are as good as that half a second when something that didn’t exist moments ago suddenly takes flight, I’m telling you. Yeah, it’s fair to say I’m pretty into it.
